Like many startups, Carv was born out of an education project, namely a PhD thesis. CEO and founder Jamie Grant completed a Master of Physics at University of Oxford before undertaking a PhD in Financial Economics at Imperial College London. He then applied both these disciplines to his passion for skiing.
1. Please tell us about yourself and your business background
Carv was born out of my PhD in economics. I learned how to analyse financial markets with statistical analysis, but I thought it would be much more interesting to apply that to teaching a sport – something that’s never been done before.
I met my Co-Founder Pruth Reddy, who has incredible engineering and software skills and four years later, in December 2017, Carv was launched – The world’s first digital ski coach that uses a smart boot insert to capture motion and pressure.
Teaching sport is a very hard problem and is almost entirely done by human coaches – which means it’s not accessible for many of the participants in the market. And what better sport to look at than skiing. I loved skiing but I wanted to get better, faster – because the better you get the more fun you have.
2. How did the idea for Carv come about? What problem does Carv solve?
Most skiers get lessons as beginners and then stop. Lessons are amazing, but often it is simply too expensive and disruptive for most recreational skiers. This means that at a certain level, most skiers find that their progress stops and they hit a plateau. We wanted to change that with Carv – now anyone can improve with this incredible data and coaching tool. It will give you a personalised technique profile, guidance on what to focus on next (based on your data) and real-time coaching that tells you exactly what to do – using audio – when you’re on the mountain skiing.
3. What is CARV?
Carv is the world’s most powerful digital ski coach, praised by The FT, NYT and The Times.
Carv consists of ultra-thin inserts (concealing 72 pressure and motion sensors) fit into any ski boot and a coaching membership that is delivered via the Carv app.
13 different metrics are measured on every turn, including Balance, Edge Angle, Turn Shape and Outside Ski Pressure, giving Carv skiers an objective way to analyse their technique.
Skiing with Carv is like having a world-class ski instructor in your ear. Carv gives you real-time audio feedback during each turn, personalised skiing tips on each chairlift and detailed analysis every time you stop. Carv members also get access to videos, articles, drills and workouts, made with the world’s best ski instructors so you can improve your skiing, on and off the mountain.
Carv is an official partner of the Professional Ski Instructors of America, and the Canadian Ski Instructors’ Alliance.
4. Who is Carv aimed at (target market)?
We have quite a wide ability range for Carv because it is so personalised. We find that a huge range of skiers from lower-level intermediate skiers right up to advanced skiers love Carv. Almost 10% of our user base are actually ski instructors. But you do need to be somewhat confident doing parallel turns to get the most from it, so we would not recommend it to total beginners; we can’t catch you if you fall (yet)!
5. What were the challenges you faced in developing Carv and how did you solve them?
We’ve had to overcome a range of very difficult problems. Let’s start with the hardware. We have to collect very accurate pressure and motion data from a very thin sensor that can fit in any ski boot. This sensor is in a cold, wet, rugged environment with lots of pressure going through it. That took us a while – lots of R&D and extensive testing. We’ve had multiple iterations and each year we’re able to improve quality and production one step further. The next big challenge is getting that data to make sense for a user – and accurately grade their ability (to give the Carv Ski:IQ score). This has required us to carefully create a ‘ground truth’ of skiing technique, with thousands of labelled video data ski sessions from the gamut of ability ranges and conditions. We can then analyse our 300 million ski turn database to create these powerful coaching metrics that drive the user experience.
6. How does Carv differ from similar products on the market, if they exist?
There aren’t really any similar products on the market to be honest. It is a very challenging area and we’re forging a new path. Outside of sport we look to Duolingo for languages as an analogy, we look up to tracking products like Strava and we work closely with traditional ski instruction of course.
But what sets Carv apart is the personalised real time data. That’s entirely novel. Any skier can now get a highly accurate, Olympic level technique breakdown – which drives their coaching recommendation algorithm. As we grow we’re able to make that insight more powerful and in turn create greater value (and fun) for our users.
7. How will users benefit from Carv?
95% of our users tell us they improve and many of them have a huge improvement in just a few days, sometimes even in hours. But we’re not even close to being done.